There are various known types of modelling concepts of physical construction toy sets. Especially, concepts using modular or semi-modular concepts are very popular as they provide an interesting and challenging play experience. Typically, these concepts provide a set of pre-manufactured construction elements that can be interconnectable with each other in some predetermined way according to modules of the pre-manufactured elements. The pre-manufactured elements may resemble well-known objects adapted to a specific modelling task. Thus in e.g. building a model of a house the elements may resemble wall bricks, roof tiles, doors, and windows. The object of selecting the elements in this way is that the work involved with the building of a model of a house is reduced significantly compared to a situation where all details of the house are to be defined each time a new model should be made. However, the complete freedom in building a house or another object is traded off for the simplicity of building the model.
For example, the toy construction sets available under the name LEGO comprise a plurality of different types of interconnectable construction elements having coupling means in the form of protrusions and corresponding cavities. The coupling means are arranged according to regular grid patterns, thereby allowing a wide variety of interconnections between construction elements.
Typically, such toy construction sets comprise a set of construction elements suitable for creating one or more construction element models, e.g. an animal, a robot, or another creature, a car, an airplane, a spaceship, a building, or the like. Typically, a construction set further includes printed building instructions or assembly instructions that illustrate how to construct a certain model from the construction elements of the set.
Typically, the building instructions enclosed in a toy construction set comprise a sequence of pictures illustrating step by step how and in which order to add the construction elements to the model. Such building instructions have the advantage that they are easy to follow, even for children without great experience in toy construction sets and/or without reading skills.
However, such building instructions have the disadvantage that they are labour-intensive and expensive to produce. Typically, the model for which building instructions are to be created is broken down into reasonable building steps and each building step is subsequently drawn in a CAD system and finally printed.
More recently, building instructions have been generated in electronic rather than in printed form. In particular, animated building instructions where the more complicated building steps are animated. However, it remains a problem to provide toy construction sets that inspire children to create their own models or to rebuild the model in a different way, thereby increasing the play value of the toy construction set.